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Fiction

Once upon a time I was happily writing a serial called The Points Between. It was a story I was incredibly passionate about telling -- a story that was viscerally important to me, even though it was way out of my comfort zone and far, far above my level of expertise -- and I'd actually finished an entire arc, and had started on the second arc, when a bunch of inconvenient things happened. The result of these inconvenient things was that the story has remained dormant for years: not dead, because it's never a story I've given up on, but dormant. I needed to make some decisions, and I didn't know what decisions I wanted to make.

I've made those decisions, and am in the process of moving forward. This is the story of that interminable process, and what came out of it.

The Points Between is, in my head, a story with three arcs. The first arc, where Matthew discovered he was a magician, was finished. The second arc, where he had to discover what that meant, was getting started. The third arc, where he had to choose how to use what he knew, was being set up. I was generally pleased with most of what I'd written, but there were a few things I'd done that had bothered me:

There have been a number of reviews for Pay Me, Bug! that have compared it to Firefly. I love those reviews, because a) Firefly is awesome, b) I wrote PMB! a year after Firefly’s painfully short-lived run (it came out in 2002, I wrote PMB! in 2003) and yes, the show did leave its mark on me so some comparison is apt, and c) Firefly did a lot of things, story-wise, that I want to do when I write—so being compared to it is a good sign.

(Though I should note that while I was writing PMB! I found myself more influenced by Farscape, and I specifically took inspiration for Grif and Amys’ relationship from an episode where John Crichton and Aeryn Sun impersonate bounty hunters and go by the names “Butch” and “Sundance.”)

There is one part of the comparison that fascinates me, which is when Grif gets compared to Malcom Reynolds. Superficially it’s a good fit: they’re both mavericks, they’re both smartasses, they’re both loyal to their crew, they’re both always getting into trouble. But I think the comparison can really be ONLY superficial. Fundamentally their characters are so different that I don’t think, at the end of the day, they would ever really get along.

The more I thought about this, the more I thought it would be fun to write about why I see it that way, and it mostly has to do with how I view Mal, who has become one of my favorite characters on television and, I think, is the proper heir to Han Solo’s Mantle of Scruffy Nerf-Herder Awesome. So without further ado, here are my Reasons Why Grif and Mal Aren’t the Same, and Why They Probably Wouldn’t Get Along.

If you're not familiar with the Wheel of Time, the series created by Robert Jordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson, this article won't mean a whole lot to you. I'm writing this primarily for other people who have read the series, primarily because I'm curious as to whether they can see the same things I see, or if it's just me. If you've never read it… well, there are probably spoilers.

I never managed to finish the Wheel of Time. I'm frustrated by this, especially since the story has been finished, and I'm invested enough in the story, even now, to want to know how everything works out. But even wanting to know hasn't been enough to sustain me. I'm one of those people who feel like the WoT dropped off in quality, pretty severely, somewhere around the middle, and I always wind up giving up. I don't think I've ever made it to book ten. I'm pretty sure I've never finished reading book nine.

Last week I had to go on a business trip to Richmond. It's an 11-13 hour drive each way, and part of that journey gave me enough time to listen to about 5% of the audiobook recording of The Lord of the Rings (seriously--that's a ridiculously long audiobook, even if you skip over all the appendices at the end). As I was listening to this audiobook, I noted two things:

1. Listening to someone read about Hobbits makes me hungry.

2. For all the talk about how absolutely fatal the One True Ring was when it started tempting you, there were people who did rather well when the time came to face it down.

There's not much to tell about #1--it's pretty self-explanatory--but #2 distracted me for a while, because while the One Ring is described throughout the book as an Irresistable Force there are actually quite a few characters in the book that... well... resist it. Some resist more than others, but there are at least seven characters who resist it to an extent that must have pissed Sauron off but good.

So... without further ado, the Top Seven Characters of Middle Earth who Resisted the Corruption of the One Ring Rather Well:

July 2, 2013: I am 42 years old. For the record, that means that for an entire year I get to be the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. I’m looking forward to that. When I turn 43 it means I will have moved beyond the question which is also kind of cool, but for now I’m going to revel in my Douglas Adams-inspired cosmic awesomeness.

This year I actually have something of a birthday request to you, my readers. It doesn’t involve spending money (though if you’re inclined to go out and buy my books, hey, that’d be awesome) but—if you’re so inclined—it does involve spending a little time. In short: if you’ve read either Pay Me, Bug! or Curveball, and if you’ve enjoyed reading them, would you consider posting a review somewhere?